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Anesthetizing Any Ability to Blow Up Or Contaminate a Chosen Politically Useful Narrative

In both adults and children it now turns out. We all are to have our ability to accurately perceive what is going on around us, its true causes, and the likely consequences under deliberate, guided assault. We get to be inadvertent active participants in fundamental transformations we might object to if we were aware. All the coordinated lies or declarations in conferences we are not invited to and books and reports we were never to see. I have seen them though and it propels this compulsion to play Paul Revere to yell “The Bad Ideas that are a-coming” to a classroom, newsroom, or PR campaign soon. Some are already in place with unfortunate psychological effects unappreciated by parents and taxpayers lured into believing that higher graduation rates or greater levels of “student achievement” or Student Growth are necessarily a good thing. Instead, many are masking changes in personality and deliberate efforts to “shatter the rule of law and regularity in the mind.”

That last quote was from a Chapter called “Direction for Human Development” in that The Great Adventure book I mentioned in the last post. Before we discuss what is planned, I want us to remember the game of Red Rover most of us played as children. As adults if we happened upon kids arguing over a badly bruised arm or shoulder injuries from a determination to hold tight against breaking the grip and accusing the fast, aggressive runner who broke through of deliberately wanting to hurt them, we would recognize the problem. Everyone intended their respective actions, but no one gave any thought to consequences beyond their own goals. Think of all the plans for credentialing students, teachers, and administrators to be change agents. Fundamentally transforming economic, political, and social systems they have deliberately been given false understandings of.

Misapprehension of what actually works, why elements really do not, and what all the likely consequences of the sought actions will be. The creators of these theories want everyone involved playing as if they were still children in Red Rover, moving through the POWER Model and securing data as to what to do next. Totally unable to accurately perceive what is bound to occur, lest that inhibit future action. In that same chapter the authors confess:

“Our use of representation, leaving immediate experience behind, and living within the confines of our constructs [or as my own children call it when I am writing ‘mom’s been in her head all day thinking’] can be particularly limiting. If we use our capacities to build edifices of knowledge that are fundamentally static and closed, we can become trapped in limiting worldviews, strangled by our own assumptions.”

Unwilling then, of course, to be Change Agents to try to force changes in the real world that will redirect history going forward. That’s why “a reform in thinking is needed…a kind of thinking that does not reject uncertainty and ambiguity [and in fact nurturing this capacity is what the hype about Rigor and Higher Order Thinking Skills is all about], but rather feeds on [the uncertainty, ambiguity, lack of a correct answer] it for a constant process of self-eco-re-organization.”

It’s no secret that I believe there is a connection between the mass school shootings and their links to communities aggressively pushing using school to dissolve the rational mind and manipulate perception from the inside-out. Today though we are talking about how all this invisibly goes global and why. The ties to violence in the past though are a component of why I am so worried. The social radicals seeking wholesale transformations have always known that “education and learning are what chiefly drive us at all the levels of activity explored by psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and all the other fields of social science, systems science, the humanities, and what we call spirituality, as well as in every other human activity that—as it most clearly does involve evolution—calls out for a newly inclusive definition and a vastly expanded and updated theory and story.”

Our Toronto planners and friends (look here from 2011 to Common Core and 90s version architect Lauren Resnick and her involvement with the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research Scientific Committee http://www.iscar2011.org/eng/ISCAR_PROGRAM_UPDATE_01092011.pdf ) really are targeting prevailing mental maps for extinction and extensive alteration. To gain the very real transformations in the actual world that so many involved in public policy are determined to have, the necessary target is “the bottom line is the perception of large masses of people–a perception oriented by the paradigm that dominates their society.”

So that paradigm, that is nurtured by fluent reading and algebra problems and geometry proofs, has to go. Without admitting that true explanation. My thanks here to the reader who pointed out the work of the FrameWorks Institute and their Strategic Frame Analysis. It describes the lies and how a perception marketing theme is uncovered and how to make sure it is not blown up or contaminated.

One of the biggest prevailing memes now–that everyone must go to college–is generally cited to Professor Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown. In an earlier version of his life he was the author of those New Workforce Training Manuals that so much of the real implementation guidelines appear to be lifted straight out of. I had looked into his background before since so many pernicious recommendations he or groups citing him are pushing for go back to a previous paper he wrote. In other words, a foundation of druthers, not factual research. That’s why I loved that he put his detailed CV in one of the manuals, apparently taking the equivalent of a victory lap. Not knowing 25 years later it would be damning.

Carnevale wanted us to know he was a Board member of the Carnegie-sponsored National Center on Education and the Economy that was created after those 1985 Carnegie agreements between the US State Department and the USSR. I think that is why Carnegie sponsored the Competency-Based Learning Summits in 2011 to get Next Generation Learning across the hype of the Common Core. It’s why Competency to me looks so much like the essential skills Carnevale laid out as Learning to Learn in the 1990 manual. Carnevale also listed having been the governmental affairs director for AFSCME, the union for state, county, and municipal public employees, the only area of union membership that grew in the last half of the 20th century.

It is Carnevale’s degrees that remind us how to use education and learning changes to invisibly drive cultural changes in collectivist directions without admitting what is going on. Or gaining consent. He listed a BA in “intellectual and cultural history” from Colby College, a rather euphemistic phrase to disguise a Marxian view of history as a process of cultural change in prevailing mindsets. An MA in “social science and public administration” from Syracuse is again quite consistent with wanting social science to be able to design human [that would be people like us], social, economic, and physical environmental systems like cities going forward, just as our Toronto planners and Cultural-Historical Activity Theorists all have in mind. (Wave to Michael Cole and Engestrom too if you click on the ISCAR link). Finally, his PhD is from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs. Billing yourself as an ‘economist’ for deference to your beliefs that the public sector should control the economy seems to me to be False Advertising in order to get Theory into Action.

Everyone wants to use education and the media too to alter how we perceive the world in predictable ways. To again get political theory into action without admitting it. Our Toronto planners in the “What Should It Look Like” chapter though gave us something else highly useful in their plans for cultural change without permission.

“In bringing the ‘active agent’ into the picture…we come to what used to be billed as the dialectical perspective. During the twentieth century the words ‘praxis’ and ‘dialectical’ became taboo within much of science and Western society because of their historical association with the ‘dialectical’ materialism’ of Marxist theory, communism, and the grim years of the Cold War…[but] “because of its enduring intellectual power…and reached its philosophical high point with Hegel, Marx, and Engels [that’s continued open admiration and reverence, folks!] has been resurrected under other names in cybernetics, chaos and complexity theory, as well as in new ways in the works of most of the authors of these chapters, as we’ll next see.”

I am going to pause here for a second. David Loye is saying that virtually all the theories guiding K-12 and higher ed ‘reforms’ are grounded in some of history’s most notorious collectivists. To mask that fact, various labels likely to be difficult to understand are being used. I guess to stop any opportunity for a blow up or contamination during the process of fundamental transformations. Now what Loye said next takes us to the very heart of the new envisioned K-12 classroom as well as what the 4 Cs of 21st Century Learning are really getting at. Here goes, with the italics as usual in the original.

“The basic dynamic for dialectics is the idea of two or more ‘forces’ and their interaction, either in conflict or working together, which shape our lives into what becomes known as history or human evolution. (Thanks to Marxism, the dialectical model is misrepresented as being solely restricted to conflict…to remedy this problem, the idea of dialogue, or the dialogical model is used to describe the alternative of two forces that complement or otherwise peacefully work together.)”

Puts a whole new spin on group projects, doesn’t it? And the omnipresent word Du Jour–collaboration.

I am going to stop here as following up on this brought me all sorts of startling real-life consequences, including the use of these Dialogic Design principles during the lead-up to the 2008 Presidential campaign and what MOOCs really intend to accomplish.

This would be easier to bear if these theories were in a sci fi novel instead of a book and blog devoted to real-time revelations.

24 thoughts on “Anesthetizing Any Ability to Blow Up Or Contaminate a Chosen Politically Useful Narrative”

Ah, yes. Come let us reason together . . .
Or, create a problem ( bad schools), scream and holler, then the people who created the problem will come forward with the solution. That’s how we got to “common core” from Northwest Regional Lab Goals.
Push NAFTA, move jobs offshore, scream about unskilled labor being too expensive, get the government to take on the task of producing ready-to-go-online labor force, and techademics becomes the goal of schooling.
Then there’s “reducing the size of government”–one way to do that is to centralize government processing. Whoa! Here comes that socialistic solution again!
Horrors!

CPW-or making government more responsive by emphasizing the local, which is much easier to plan and where all the officials seem to have been thoroughly immersed in Agenda 21 even if they never heard the term.

While people are beginning to wake up to shifts in K-12 being attributed to the Common Core, all the elements of a planned society and economy centering on data and Corporatism with the public sector is locking into place. I have talked to some of the local businessmen on these boards. They really cannot afford to alienate government officials by refusing to participate and it’s hard to initially see their participation becomes the excuse for even more Mind Arson as Competencies become the Educable Push for all.

WOW L.L. That sums it all up doesn’t it? We will all look so peaceful and global and systems thinking forward and mindful as we march ourselves into oblivion. I am not kidding that I keep flashing to images of a future that looks a lot like the Community in the book The Giver.

I am going to have to read that book, The Giver, now lol. I post stuff on Agenda 21 and The Club of Rome on my facebook page and I get very few responses, mostly from people who already know about it. 90% of the people do not understand either about what it is, or they think there is nothing wrong with it. The more I understand the more I am frustrated that I can’t get others to even be interested in the changes. I have had people come to me at work and ask my a question out of the blue, and I try to tell them what I know, but then they say, “that’s all over my head” and they don’t want to go any farther.

Lynda-in the next post we are going to talk about the Club of Rome because one of the founders, Alexander Christakis, was angry and resigned because the CoR chose to go with a modelling world systems approach, instead of using social science techniques and education to change perception. We know that the related Club of Budapest and the Holos Consciousness Laszlo, the Dali Llama, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab and others are all pushing that I have written about are taking the angle Christo wanted. Christo was one of the contributors to The Great Adventure book. When I checked for contemporary uses of his described techniques in education out the info poured. My specialty.

Christo developed the cogniscope technique that MOOCs and other online courses are interested in using to guide students to common perceptions of what the global problems are. The NCDD we looked at that the Kellogg and Rockefeller foundations are pushing so to encourage DEliberation and Dialogue to reach common understandings has been giving out the cogniscope software for free.

On Agenda 21, I find people who have heard of it assume it is an allegation of some type of conspiracy instead of open declarations involving education and land use of what society must be transitioning to in the 21st century. Perhaps the best way to link is when people are upset about rezoning or the new presence of what I call Soviet housing (the multi=family units that look so generic and are tied to transit) and tell them it is part of a coordinated plan and the plan is generally on file. I was quite angry to discover that the area where I live had such a plan, that it was designed to prepare students to work for area hospitals (but not as a doctor) or Big Blue or insurance companies in the community. To be a citizen drone. One of the members of the committee that developed the plan had wanted to stay the head of the high school foundation after he pulled his own child out and put her in private school. At no point did he tell anyone of what I and other parents would have recognized as a conflict. He got mad at me when I asked why the foundation was funding the expensive and controversial teacher training and development of Spence Rogers, the co-creator of Transformational OBE.

Now I know why. Transformational OBE fits perfectly with the planned shift of Sandy Springs to an economy and land use determined by political authorities just like all these workplace competencies, special sectors, filed economic development and land use plans, career pathways all envision. It fits with the Economic Plan the Atlanta Regional Commission has created for the 10-county area that calls for all school districts to use ‘innovative’ education practices. Just like the Club of Rome called for in 1979 and the FrameWorks Institute calls for in their papers on the Core Story of Education they have created for all those listed foundations including the Ford Foundation.

It all fits. Most people though cannot grasp that all these individual gears exist by design and that they are pulling all of us quietly and stealthily in a planned direction. I simply get both the parts and the total vision. When you see particular concrete parts in your own community, put it in the broader context to whatever extent you think your listener can handle. What appears to the casual observer as madness is quite methodical. We have every right to factually describe what is going on and use our Axemaker Minds to pick up on all the bogus rationales we are being fed.

Makes me think of a couple things. 1) the cluster of NewVisions for public schools in NY (compliments of Carnegie / Gates), where high schools are divided by career paths with names like Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance, Khalil Gibran International Academy etc.
2) ASU which is now a leading example for the New American University, where “social embeddedness” rules and Pearson and Knewton have been declared school officials–hooray, for free, unlimited access to student data!
3) And, of course, IBMs smarter cities, where data will be used to solve a sweeping range of issues: social, economic, health, education.

I agree with the others posting–it’s tough to get people to listen. I talked with a 1st grade veteran teacher today who was frustrated that all the new professional development required many proven methodologies like phonics to be put aside. In its place are discussions about how the kids feel about their learning, & what they think about their thinking as they read. Mind you this is first grade–they are reading “The fat cat sat on the mat,” not Dostoyevsky. I got her to agree that the changes seemed to be driven by a larger agenda but in no way was she going to believe that the end goal was to manipulate students’ values and beliefs.

I know JT, but people have come a long way in what they are ready to believe and there is not a dispute on the facts. I will be here and so will the book when they realize they must know how it all fits.

I would also note that Bellamy’s book sold very well in the US too. I used it in a post to make a point more than a year ago. I think it was the 2nd biggest seller in US after Uncle Toms Cabin during the 19th century.

But then this is a fact=centric blog and that is an essay designed to evoke feelings and a sense of injustice.

Are you thinking of the Ny Performance Consortium? Linda Darling-Hammond has cited them as well as Envision Schools for the type of ‘assessments’ we are evolving to. PARCC and SBAC are first step, then AIR and McGraw Hill’s that Ga goes to this year. I have already tied that assessment to David Conley’s work and cybernetic theory of guiding perception. Thanks to the area super mentioning he viewed it as a “high quality assessment” and was pleased at the decision. I know precisely what high quality means down to checklists of criteria.

In it though are the links to previous coverage of NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, Philaselphia, Boston, and San Francisco, respectively. It all pertains to the real intentions behind the Common Core and why land use and economic, social, and political transformations just keep coming up.

The only way to stop all these horrific, interrelated, collectivist ideas is to understand them. It’s why I am back reading a book from the 50s today for the precious insights that I can then use to explain today’s realities.

I hear you! I keep trying too but it is sooooo difficult to get people to sit still and consider it all. My own husband, a very smart man and former educator, cannot accept that the labels like 21 Century Ready or Learning to Learn are nothing more than edu-spin as part of how schools market themselves.

He is still stuck on believing that the spin is nothing more than a new feel good pitch that heads of school can use to differentiate themselves from other schools.

Because he left teaching in the late 90’s he imagines that “learning to learn” was and is harmless because when he was teaching people were still instructing with facts and figures. He was not part of the group that had to teach values or behaviors.

He was teaching when private schools were beginning to seriously push the idea that students should not be the recipients of lecture instruction only from expert educators. BUT he and many teachers at the time just like him understood that to mean that once they had lectured! they would then begin a dialogue withe the students so an exchange of ideas could occur among the group.

This was a reality that looks very different from “project based learning” or online gaming activities which completely remove the teacher from the equation.

Ironically he was a philosophy and poli-sci major in college but I suspect going back to read it all again seems daunting and so its easier to believe the aims are of all this are harmless and that Uncle Karl’s ideas are dead.

“For now, citizens may well look to the United Cities of America to drive progress. And so we may have passed a tipping point of the metropolitan revolution: the most ambitious and effective politicians will pursue city government careers rather than head to the nation’s capital.

In both the US and UK, achieving inclusive city growth – the apparent goal of this generation of revolutionaries – will require adopting a new scale of focus, redistributing powers and responsibilities between national and local governments.”

That is from an RSA blog post. Off most people’s radar but guiding all we are dealing with. This idea that in the 21st century political authority at all levels gets to be in charge of people and property and direct its use and dictate what may not be done. It makes a mockery of a free society but since we still have elections and words like “high-quality education” or Excellence sound good, these fundamental shifts are not being properly tied together.

Other readers may want to check for their own cities like Columbia, SC or Tallahassee, Fla that may be unexpected. Notice the mention of a right to broadband for all citizens that means the rest of us have the obligation to pay Comcast and other providers. Notice the mention of education as being “high quality” which means Whole Child and in preparation for the “21st century workforce.”

Did you spot Charles Fadel from Curriculum redesign in the Ross institute? This is a video on what students should learn in the 21st century. Vimeo.com/50409698
Ross Institute met with the Electrum Foundation for strategic development in planning the institute. Electrum (find more at eititclabs) is very involved in ICT and education – Kista Science City. All of this drips of where they want the US to go.

Not to be all doom and gloom here, but, I do not see much of a chance of recovery for the NW. We have been entrenched in Tranzi OBE from the beginning. Unless someone reads your book and gets a clue, we will head down this destructive path with only regrets of “how did that happen?” in the public mind.

This is actually not a hard story once it is recognized to exist. Sunlight on the story remains to way out and the only chance this generation has for continued mass prosperity of any sort. The alternative even if all works as intended is the Ford Foundation’s Line of Plenty they laid out in the run-up to Rio +20 in 2012.

Don’t know where else to post this link showing Katie Couric’s interview with Melinda Gates, but it almost makes me sick to my stomach….while there is some truth spoken, I suppose, here are a few points that raised my eyebrows:
1) The implication that what teachers were doing before in making kids memorize math facts was preventing deeper learning.
2) Some kids have never had to think critically in reading prior to the Common Core.
3) Breaking news is that now because of the Common Core implementation in KY back in 2011, the graduation rate has now risen to 86%!
4) What the hell is a “deep, meaningful evaluation” ? (of teachers) (approx 7:30 mark, if you can make it that far).

It would be nice if she and Katie would seem simply own up to that real vision that the 21st century and the affluent West is where the elites have decided to try Uncle Karl’s vision again and see if “from each according to his talents, to each according to his needs” can work this time if built on a base of cybernetic technology and data gathering and education built around that intent a la Sweden in the 1960s.

Robin-
You know, regarding Kentucky ‘s ( and other states I’m sure) belief that everyone can work in ed or healthcare I have noted how in the past two years there has been an explosion in brick and mortar edifices from suburbs to cities that are essentially monuments to the healthcare industry.

Hospitals are bigger, ambulances are pinker in support of breast cancer, and flashy urgent care centers are sprinkled through every strip mall.

It’s fairly easy to see what drives a society and what is valued by looking at what buildings sport the biggest signs and the most premium real estate .

I left a healthcare career behind. Suffered some burn out, mostly grew tired of every woman coming through being put on antidepressants. Drug reps with goodies touting the next best drug, regardless of awful or embarrasing side effects. More meds, more drugs, drug companies control more healthcare than physicians. Starting to sound like Ed reform? We used to fight over the Viagra pens and coffee mugs. Even when drug company sponsored gifts were not allowed any longer, it did not change.